even assholes get lonely

shit. if my dogs could sing they’d be yodeling. bunions, blisters, warts on the toes. it’s torture just to walk around these days. so, i don’t know. i’m like 6 or 7 beers into the night already, you know. and by the way, when’s the last time you were in love? huh? well, so what. what-the-fuck-ever. i know what’s what when it comes to connubial matters, or concupiscent ones, for that matter. love it or leave it or something, or what’s something, at least, or not. what i mean is like you get to depend on the weather for making you feel a certain way, but maybe, you see, just maybe, that’s better than depending on another person for it. you’ve got to figure at least. for me? well, there’s the kids to think about. my little girl with her ethel merman eyes and her marmalade smile. and maybe the music’s better now that the lights are floored, you know, not coming down and shining on your pate from above. up at you instead. so it’s come down to this well-let-me-walk-the-night-away shit, in the heat, on these hot nights when you can’t sleep, can’t do anything useful, so you trudge broke and foot-sore all the over town, out-classed by bums and vagabonds, rivering along crooked down alleys and jaywalking over narrow one-ways, crusty with dried sweat in the scattered flecks of sunset light scabbing by, crabby but at peace too, and then i’m getting beer drunk in a dark bar, short-changing my dreams for a song, and humming myself awake again, becoming, well, comfortable in my body, at ease beneath my skin. records change. they get broken. sometimes the factory quits you. and, just to say, like plums in the icebox, these were times when i was getting wake-up calls at night. shoddy was the style of me. and it fit too. it’s likely i was taking my time, being lazy, in need of something dire to happen, to make things, i don’t know, more endearing. it wasn’t a chancy way to be behaving. it was no way for a grownup to be acting, that’s for sure. but don’t blame me for the reconstituted b.s. that people lust for. that’s not my personal responsibility. don’t hold me fucking accountable. understand me when i say that i’m no hole-in-the-wall sightseer. i want to be in the thick of things. lanky and outstanding and curled in the cut. but i’m a tremendous outsider when it comes to congealing with the likes of others. catch me off guard and i’ll join the huddle around the bar. in a roaring sophomoric-at-best effort i’ll eagerly accompany any ass scratcher to the nearest one-stop shopping spree. i’m tranced with hearts and gobbled up by change. humming gets me by. shit, my voice could make a chandelier weep. there’s no danger of that happening while the rain’s still on the make though. looking like any old randolph or hank. shit. i’ll climb a tree before i spend my money on a visiting jersey. shit. i’ll be quick about it in the meantime. wrestle a cigarette off a nearly-well-enough before the cops go home for the night. but don’t let me grumble about it all over hipper stances than this when i’m holding a leg bent behind my back and starting my sentences with logarithmic cutlery. damn the hell of it. fuck. i’ll start over before i get going, too, right like raining tupperware and fielding contact questions without advice. yeah, and the lottery picks a loser again. lost cause. over-charging the best interest in comeuppance. get distilled and invest your personality in a situation. that’s a sham, but it works more often than often. i cure my own anxious moods with stale beer. over is under. get it crooked. right? so, hell the what, and then some less of more, just in case the backlash is catching your jaw off guard. so it’s on purpose at best. tracks of mind gone to the hayfields. i don’t interpret boredom for anyone. being who you are is enough. getting better at being yourself. acting like you. that’s a stuffy thing, inside or out, and housekeep some in your soul’s living room, when you’re not living there, of course, while you’re at it. forget about hightailing or reupholstering or violating the moves you make. there’re compensations arising all the time. flattering light to the way you gaze. i don’t care twenty-two cents for it most of the time, but hardly is justification for itself. then you get women going all umbilical on you, and there’re prices that keep being paid. the sun’s dreading away. and there i go with another try at figuring out what kind of person i am. not this kind? maybe. the kind who smells things before he touches them? not the nicest try. hula-hoop around it. drop the salutations. add in a few valedictions. monday through it all while morning forbids itself still. ballsy move. undetectable also. like forking over some gentle odds. go back to the plucked stems in your garden and yank. i was stuck making fun of little children for some reason one blowy evening while drinking tea on a balcony, and there were florets carved into the building across the street. they resembled torches. i mentioned this to some tea-drinking nelly who shot me a look of desperation and pluckless waste. so seems well’s good for some nothing too. and here these no-look passes of days go by, rootless, everything old under the sun, and none of the differences, yeah, yeah. so, tremble. cordon off your guilt with yawns. go be little among the animals. i’ve got odds that’ll make your seersucker soul shiver. stand around in the street all day? under the leaky frond shadows palm trees make? that’s no way to behave. i won’t put up with it. go ahead and bumrush the clouds, so, and then you’re seeping with soggy thoughts, washed in the ballyhoo of being you, and trying is a bit more false than it once was. after spilling all this wanting all over town, i mean, shit, sometimes it’s just nice to feel wanted. i get more than 6 beers into it, well, forget about it. it’s not going to stop anyplace of a time soon. the night’s vomiting me up sure enough then. get a bead on ambitions and inhibitions and leave the tire taste of it all somewhere that’s closer than behind. i smoke my nights down past the filter. shit. the mornings? hang an out-of-service sign around my neck and throw me in the briar patch. i’m in debt to myself for more than i’d ever want to pay. underconfident and forever looking for a way out. life is just a series of having gone through a that to get to a this until that this becomes another that. an only why’d to a way to never have to try again. that’s a drifting hankering that’s not a little less than suspicious-looking. it’s just what it is and you don’t got to get scared or be nasty about it. everybody who lives has terrible things happen. it’s part of this thing we do called being alive. i’m not special. nobody is. cop to it. be eager in taxicab yellows and lab-coat whites. as special as being this thing that motions itself through it all. but we all are. in the hip pocket of the world. we all are. kissing the tailgate, fanning flameouts through basaltic throughcuts, caroming into the rumble bars of our independent yet all-together-now highways. we all are, too. dangling like leis from arrester-bed nightmares, hoping all heaven stays put for a bit. all this seiching between things as the ullage of what i was grows and grows. concatenate your dreams in the dead-ringer lines of what you once hoped you never were, and, god, it’s unlucky if you do and worse luck if you do it over. that’s what keeps my coffee strong enough to float a lug wrench on. that and my looks, which get mistaken for perilously close to decent, just over and teetering towards the lee side of handsome most times. but letter writing is a lost art form, and i don’t see many caimans round these parts lately. so i’ll lace my boots with greased copper wires, stand around with my hands outside my pockets, slum the shores of regret with empty bottles and a broken smile, pacing myself with laziness under the cloudy sky’s rumpled wedding dress, my heart an abandoned movie theater late at night, catering to the wounded clefts sliced into the hustle and crafty guts of being me. the moon’s just a pale-blue bowling ball guttered through spiraling rifts and gravel pits and ship-wrecked currents of my waylaid head as i wash my eyes with alcohol. damn, i should get this show off the road. i know it. stop speeling and reeling. get a hardy grip on the present and take a few steady jabs at the future. but i’m using myself as a prop to shout at, or with, and there are instincts for groomed sienna dirt that lead one over the dew of just-mown grass when had-about-enough gets even with plenty-more-where-that-came-from. it’s a drunkards prayer in a graveyard, a lost cause, a pie pan’s flash, a loss cut too deep to run away from. the lord picks on me sometimes, and, shit, i get indecisive too, but for now the beer’s running yellow-gold rivers through my soul, and it appears that i’ve got more than floating on my mind. you see, i’ve been sinking for so long that i can’t remember what it’s like to swim. the chicken shits lap me. the flies hover. my hands. my hands. my trembling god damn hands. if i can just lift this one last drink. if i can coax my trembling way out of this one. shit. i get a dozen drinks into it and i’m floored and dizzy and collapsing. all gone and lariated to where i can never quite get to be. sure, shame on me no matter how many drinks deep i’m into it, when one’s too much and even a thousand won’t be enough. lower than alone. stuck in the passing lane. jump-started with no place to go. somebody kick over a barstool. i want to hear what it sounds like.